Re-develop your taste
Cancer and chemotherapy have a significant impact on your life. Your taste experience can also change. Cancer patients often have a need for soft, fatty and creamy dishes. This is the result of the chemotherapy.
The therapy seriously affects saliva formation in the mouth. This will give you a much drier mouth. This occurs during a chemotherapy many mouth problems such as inflamed corners of the mouth, irritated mucous membranes of the mouth, poor taste, bad breath and difficulty speaking. All these factors contribute to a reduced appetite and a change in taste. Soft, fatty and creamy foods can compensate for this. In addition, drinking a lot of water is very important.
Change
Doctors Ellen Kuiper-Kramer and Otto Visser investigated whether a pattern could be discovered in the taste experience of cancer patients. As a result of chemotherapy, the sense of taste can be greatly affected and even permanently changed. Savory types become sweet-toothed and vice versa. “The meatball in your grandmother’s pan, the first rhubarb from the cold ground, new potatoes with mustard or sea salt. All those things that you liked so much: suddenly it all tastes like nothing,” says Visser.
find it back
After chemotherapy, you should develop your taste again. That is why the doctors, together with Jonnie Boer van de Librije, developed a taste palette with the five flavors sour, sweet, salty, bitter and umami. The flavors have been tested on a group of patients and Boer has developed several recipes.
1. Farmhouse cottage cheese and honey soufflé
2. Young mackerel with cockles
3. Spicy tartare from IJsselrund
4. Lemon tart and white chocolate sorbet
5. Cod back baked on brioche bread
The recipes come from Beleefjesmaak.nl: a platform with recipes and tips about taste experience for (ex) cancer patients. This website is a collaboration of Jonnie and Thérèse Boer and doctors Ellen Kuiper-Kramer and Otto Visser
